Editor's note: The following essay was reprinted
in Resource Library on July 16, 2008 with permission of the Hudson
River Museum. If you have questions or comments regarding the text, or wish
to obtain a copy of the exhibition catalogue from which it is excerpted,
please contact the Hudson River Museum directly through either this phone
number or web address:

Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840-1910
takes a fresh look at American genre painting from
the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth,
an era when industrial and technical innovations were changing society irrevocably.
The exhibition, using paintings with home and family motifs, interprets
these subjects not just for the information they impart about the stylistic
and thematic concerns of the period, but also for their insights into particular
social and cultural phenomena. Although rooted in the genre traditions of
European art, these scenes of Victorian America typically reveal the optimism
and nationalism fueled by the democratic experience in this country.

With their primary emphases on feeling and emotional response
rather than objective confrontation with everyday realities, the images
of domestic harmony in this exhibition invite reflection not only on what
the artists and their patrons (and by extension the public at large) chose
to deny, but on why. A multi-faceted thematic approach is used to discuss
life at home for urban, rural, and black families as well as courtship and
marriage rituals, the cult of domesticity, and children in the child-centered
nineteenth-century family. Thus, in order to explore the hidden implications
of "domestic bliss" through these paintings, questions about the
broader aspects of daily experience, using the artist as a mirror of his
times, are asked. Such images take on new levels of meaning when looked
at, not as statements of an era obsessed with sentiment and superficial
excess, but rather as expressions of a complex and increasingly fragmented
society.

Introduction

"Home gives a certain serenity to the mind, so that
everything is well marked, and sparkling in a clear atmosphere." [1]

Throughout the long history of the art of painting, artists
have depicted scenes of home and family life. Double marriage portraits
survive from the days of ancient Rome, as do wall paintings that show furnished
domestic interiors and scenes of children at play. In the Middle Ages, illustrations
concerned with the family -- for example, in the illuminated manuscripts
called Books of Hours -- focused on adult courtship rituals and community
activities; scenes including children were rare. At the continual mercy
of epidemic disease, famine, and war during these harsh centuries, families
were structured so that primary loyalties were to manorial ties and the
welfare of the community as a whole, rather than the individual family unit.
The high infant mortality rates contributed to parents' reluctance to become
overly attached to their children, who, in early childhood, were generally
placed into apprenticeships or some other kind of service with a different
family.

During the Renaissance, the family most commonly depicted
in art was a symbolic one -- the infant Christ with his parents, Mary and
Joseph. The tenderness and spiritual devotion conveyed by these images of
the Holy Family are alluded to in numerous similarly constructed secular
scenes of later periods to comprise allegories of the ideal of family love.

By the seventeenth century, ties to a predominantly communal
life were loosened, and what we now think of as the modern family began
to emerge. With more emphasis on the rights of the individual, and greater
opportunity for privacy within the home, the favored family unit became
that of a husband and wife who lived together over a lifetime, and who nurtured
their children, and participated in their education and preparation for
the future."[2] While artists
were frequently commissioned by the nobility to execute family groups and
paired marriage portraits often posed in luxurious settings, the Dutch seventeenth-century
genre artists -- painters of scenes from everyday life -- were among the
first to honor the simpler pleasures of peasant and middle-class home life.
The relatively low cost of these latter works of art resulted in a changing
patronage, and a new class of art buyer emerged. As subtle mirrors of social
change, many of these paintings celebrated material wellbeing and glorified
the Protestant ethos of family and marriage that scholars and visitors to
Holland noted at the time. The home had become a "secular temple"
of beauty, serenity, cleanliness and order, an ideal retreat from the hectic
entrepreneurial world of trade." [3]

In the eighteenth century, artists such as William Hogarth
in England and Jean-Baptiste Greuze in France used images of family life
(via the popular prints made from them) to educate the public about the
dangers of laziness and immorality. The didacticism of such works, combined
with an often complex narrative, was inherited from Dutch examples of the
previous century. It was also an important ingredient of genre painting
in the Victorian period, when images of home and family life were extremely
popular. Walter Dendy Sadler's Home Sweet Home (fig. 1) is a typical
example of the type of imagery that dominated the annual exhibitions and
sale rooms in Britain during Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901). In Sadler's
picture, a well-to-do middle-class family celebrates Christmas together;
the mistletoe hanging from the ceiling and the holly on the mantle indicate
the season. Through grandparents seated serenely by the hearth, and grandchildren
carolling with their parents, the artist has conceived an ideal happy family,
a sentimental symbol of an age that could take as its supreme example the
domestic fulfillment of its Queen, her consort Prince Albert, and their
large royal brood.

The cult of domesticity pervasive in Victorian Britain
found similar expression in America. The two great English-speaking powers
of the nineteenth century maintained a close relationship from about 1840,
and there was a lively cultural exchange that flowed in both directions."[4] Three of the most successful painters
of American domestic genre in the second half of the nineteenth century
-- John George Brown, Seymour Joseph Guy, and Thomas Hovenden -- emigrated
to the United States from Britain as young adults, Their work was exhibited
abroad in the 1870s and 1880s, and a long essay on Brown was published in
an English art periodical in 1882.[5]

Like its English counterpart, the culture of domesticity
in America was espoused in popular songs, prints and magazines, religious
tracts and advice manuals, as well as in literature and the arts. The middle
class was the primary audience; its domination of America's cultural and
economic life was assured after about 1830 as the growth of cities and rapid
industrialization resulted in greater levels of prosperity, The strong moral
and religious underpinnings that bolstered middle-class life could make
strict adherence to its code formidable and crippling. In literature, for
example, novels such as The Story of Avis (1877) by Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps and The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin, are centered on marital
dissatisfaction and tedious domestic routine, while the sordid implications
of infidelity are a sub-text in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady (1881)
and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (1905). In William Dean Howell's
A Modern Instance (1881), Bartley Hubbard feels stifled by the cloying
domesticity of his marriage and longs for the liberty of his bachelorhood.
Though divorce itself was the ultimate threat to the family code, a play
by Augustine Daly called Divorce (1871) was one of the hits of the
day when it was performed in the major Eastern cities, and it was revived
continually till the end of the century.

Depictions of family breakdown are much rarer in domestic
genre painting, a reflection of the idealizing tendencies of the American
genre tradition as a whole. Nevertheless, a few images, for example Eastman
Johnson's Not at Home (c. 1872, The Brooklyn Museum), and Edmund
Tarbell's The Breakfast Room (cat. no. 10), evoke the living styles
of the upper classes in domestic spaces resonant with tension. In a similar
vein, the sophisticated ennui of the elegantly-dressed couple in William
Merritt Chase's An Open Air Breakfast (c. 1888, Toledo Museum of
Art) masks a lovers' quarrel. On a different economic level, the couple
in Thomas Waterman Wood's The Drunkard's Wife (fig. 2) painted in
1887, provides an urban contrast to the blissful scenes of rural family
life which comprise the bulk of this artist's oeuvre. The painting might
well have served as a poster for the active temperance movement of the period,
for it depicts a woman angrily confronting a tavern-keeper as she points
to the body of her drunken husband collapsed in the gutter.

Perhaps the most poignant examples of family dysfunction
in American art are two works by the German-born painters Charles Ulrich
(1858-1908) and Robert Koehler (1850-1917). Ulrich's In the Land of Promise
-- Castle Garden (fig. 3) of 1884 is one of the few significant
paintings on the subject of emigration to America. The expressive potency
of the composition with its weary-looking figures and large-scale realism
underlines the trauma suffered by families uprooted from their homelands
for economic or political reasons. Impending disaster to the structure of
a working class family is implicit in The Strike (fig. 4) by Robert
Koehler, a compelling painting of early industrial strife in America. Koehler
makes it clear that in an era of few unemployment benefits, the innocent
victims of such a struggle are the women and children: the woman in the
center of the painting actively pleads against her husband's commitment
to his fellow workers and their cause; a mother and her two children wanly
observe the action in the left foreground.

While the work of artists like Ulrich and Koehler shares
the social awareness of European naturalism, American genre painters generally
ignored the darker side of life, preferring instead the idyllic, the sentimental,
or the nostalgic. Besides, a painting was a costly purchase, and American
art patrons here, often self-made men themselves, were not likely to buy
for their living room walls a perpetual reminder of life's harsher realities.
The optimism and self-confidence that was a national by-product of "the
land of promise," that Eden of boundless opportunity that was America,
was captured prior to the Civil War on the canvases of painters like William
Sidney Mount (cat. no. 50) and Jerome Thompson (cat. no. 20), whose work
appealed to a large public. Art lovers at that time were willing to pay
high prices for American genre painting, and print-makers like Currier and
Ives and Louis Prang sold reproductions of the most popular works. Later
in the century the nationalistic conventions of the old American genre tradition
were continued in scenes of home life by artists such as Thomas Hovenden
(cat. no. 33), Edward Lamson Henry (cat. nos. 26, 27), and William Henry
Lippincott (cat. nos. 46, 47).

Nevertheless, by the 1870s the market for contemporary
American paintings had diminished. Many American artists had already begun
their exodus to the European art academies for training that exposed them
to different aesthetic values and imagery that moved beyond mere story-telling.
In addition, patrons travelled abroad and began to import European art by
such favorites as William Bouguereau, Jules Breton, and Ludwig Knaus. Bouguereau's
slick compositions, for example, which often depicted idealized peasant
families and wide-eyed melancholic children, enjoyed enormous stature among
America's new millionaires."[6]
American artists who felt the financial pinch of changing taste could only
protest the invasion of this "foreign stuff."[7]

However, there still remained a small but loyal band of
American patrons and promoters who were particularly fond of the native
product, and who supported it during its general period of neglect through
the end of the nineteenth century.[8]
In fact, as the many pictures in this exhibition demonstrate, the vogue
for American genre painting, particularly imagery centered on home-loving
values and idyllic domestic scenes, seems scarcely to have abated. Its survival
was assured, in part, because, like so much of the European art preferred
by American patrons, it too spoke to the general taste for domestic sentiment
and pictorial narrative. The American public had little enthusiasm for the
idea of "art for art's sake" and the aesthetics of the New Movement
that confronted them in the 1870s. As the critic for the New York Daily
Tribune wrote in 1877:

Pictures that tell stories will, for a long while to come,
be ... popular in America . . . . A thoroughly good piece of genre painting
is almost always bought as soon as exhibited, especially when it shows a
certain amount of technical realism. It is not strange, therefore, that
a constantly increasing proportion of our younger artists should turn to
this field of performance.[9]

While the majority of the artists in this exhibition had
at least some training in Europe, they typically preferred to paint scenes
that endorsed the American way of life, particularly the codes of behavior
governing domestic interplay. The positive advantages of life in a democratic
society were overtly expressed. Nonetheless, the hypocrisy smoldering beneath
its cheerful facade quietly surfaced, albeit on admittedly rare occasions.

The Family Circle

By the early nineteenth century, "Home" was less
a place of family productivity (farming, crafts, weaving) and more a sanctuary
or protective barrier against the pressures of an increasingly competitive
and often ruthless world of work.[10].
Illustrations such as The Happy Family (fig. 5), which appeared in
1843 in Miss Leslie's Magazine, a popular monthly aimed at the female
reader, underscore the symbolic role of the family as a stable force in
a society undergoing irrevocable change, as well as the different social
roles of family members. The husband/father whose labor on the "outside"
has entitled him to the security and repose of the charmed domestic circle
pictured here, is the object of an adoring wife and children, one of whom
kneels before him in awe. Even the family dog in the foreground strikes
a fawning pose. Likewise, in Domestic Felicity (cat. no. 1) by William
E. Winner, an affectionate couple and their children are embraced by the
pristine beauty of the landscape behind them. They exemplify the perfect
family, isolated, in this instance, in an Edenic retreat far from the cares
of urban reality.

In the prosperous decade following the Civil War, family
group portraits, often posed in luxurious interiors, enjoyed a fashionable
vogue. Edward Lamson Henry and Eastman Johnson were two of the artists who
excelled in this genre and who responded to commissions from wealthy and
socially prominent patrons. Perhaps the most celebrated work of this type
is The Hatch Family (fig. 6), painted by Eastman Johnson in 1871.
Alfrederick Smith Hatch, who commissioned the painting, was a successful
Wall Street businessman. The Hatches, their eleven children, and Mr. Hatch's
mother-in-law and father are pictured in the library of their home at Thirty-seventh
Street and Park Avenue in New York. As Nicolaus Mills has observed, they
are "literally enveloped by the luxury around them."[11] Unlike such works as George Henry Story's
"Our Father who art in Heaven" (cat. no. 5), with
its message of family piety, or Aaron Draper Shattuck's The Shattuck
Family, with Grandmother, Mother, and Baby William (cat. no. 2), an
homage to the timelessness of family affection, Johnson's Hatch Family
pays tribute as much to opulent domestic trappings as to the concerns
of a caring family. Its combination of portraiture and genre with informally
posed figures set in home surroundings is derived from the traditions of
the eighteenth-century conversation piece.

As documents of the furnishings of a richly appointed house
of the time, paintings like the Hatch Family also underscore the
growing importance of interior decoration in a society that was becoming
more consumer-oriented and urban (see cat. nos. 8, 9). Magazines like Godey's
Ladies Book, Woman's Home Companion, and The Household had advice
columns for women on choosing the proper furnishings, wallpapers, and color
schemes. In addition, illustrated home-decorating books such as Clarence
Cook's House Beautiful (1878) and Harriet Spofford's Art Decoration
Applied to Furniture (1879) were two of many issued by important publishing
houses. The furnished clutter of most Victorian homes, cozily filled with
visual follies and a multitude of patterns, also served as another reminder
of the separate spheres of responsibility in middle-class family life in
the nineteenth century. Home decor, with its comforting abundance of ornament,
was a feminine counterpart to the bare, bureaucratic spaces that often comprised
the male work place.

Home-building handbooks in the early nineteenth century
were usually illustrated with Greek Revival styles that a skilled carpenter
could modify according to the new home buyer's wishes. By the 1840s the
Gothic was the dominant revival mode, a response in part to the advocacy
of the "Christian Home" or ideal rural cottage, which, unlike
the pagan temple style of Greek Revival, fitted the moral and religious
temper of the times.[12] The great
popularizer of the country home situated away from the tempting vices and
stresses of the city was Andrew Jackson Downing, whose Cottage Residences,
published in 1842, went through many editions for decades. His work
stimulated the demand for builders' guides and pattern books, and attractive
housing became easier to build and more available to a wider range of economic
levels. The three most basic styles advocated by Downing were the Gothic
Revival cottage, the Italianate villa, and the bracketed mode, so named
because of the wooden supports visible under projecting eaves. Home ownership,
which not only carried with it the mark of status and success but also exemplified
the family values cherished by the middle class, became increasingly important
by the middle of the nineteenth century.[13]Summer Residence with Croquet Players (cat. no. 14) painted
around 1870 by an unknown American artist, is a portrait of a house built
in the Italianate style. An eclectic mix, with its bracketed roof, oddly
shaped tower, and columned veranda, the design of the house permitted an
airy participation with nature (the sea is visible at the right) without
succumbing to its discomforts. Pictured at the left of the painting are
a couple and two of their children playing croquet. A fashionable family
sport that was particularly popular in the 1870s, it was the subject of
countless illustrations.[14] A
child with his dogs stands at the center of the picture, and an older couple
on the porch enjoy the view. The image of the house seems to dominate the
painting, but a balance is achieved by the actively engaged figures. We
are reminded again that "Home" and "Family" were inseparable
symbols, havens of stability in a rapidly changing society.

The Rural Family

With the cities expanding so quickly -- for example New
York's population tripled from 1840 to 1870 -- and farm communities, particularly
in the Northeast, losing population as factory and mill produce exceeded
the value of agriculture's yield, the old rural way of life became an important,
albeit nostalgic, subject in the visual arts. Although an agrarian economy
still prospered in the Midwest, its passing in the Northeast elicited responses
that bordered on the tragic. Here is a typical example from a story written
in 1858:

High on a bleak and barren hill ... stands the old meeting
house of North Parish. Once upon a time it was the nucleus of a flourishing
country village ... no less than three 'stores' made it a place of commercial
importance. But this Augustan age has passed forever. In the valleys about,
thriving factory villages have sprung up, and business has slid down into
them.[15]

Despite urban expansion, many could recall growing up on
farms, and the stressful ways of the city (witness the rage for rural cottages
mentioned earlier) encouraged a yearning for less complex times:

Far away beyond the glamor of the city and its strife,

There's a quiet little homestead by the sea.

Where a tender, loving lassie used to live a happy life,

As contented in her home as she could be.[16]

ran the poignant lyrics of one popular song.

Rural nostalgia is typified by Jerome Thompson's painting
The Old Oaken Bucket (fig. 7). It was inspired by Samuel Woodworth's
famous poem, "The Old Oaken Bucket" (1818), a reminiscence of
Woodworth's own boyhood on the family farm and Thompson painted the first
of two versions in 1860. Sketches of the old Woodworth homestead in Scituate,
Massachusetts, made years earlier by the artist who was a family friend,
served as the model for the cottage in the painting. The figure of the young
Woodworth, pictured at the well with his sister, was based on a childhood
likeness.[17] In 1867, Thompson
was commissioned by the owner of the Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, Addington
Frye, to paint a second version of The Old Oaken Bucket for reproduction
as a chromolithograph. In a series of exhibitions to promote sales of the
prospective chromo, the painting created a sensation wherever it was shown.
One glowing report went so far as to declare that "The Old Oaken
Bucket has met with a greater success than any picture ever exhibited
in this country, and will long be remembered by the many thousands who have
seen it."[18] Thompson's
conscious look backwards to a pristine ideal, with its rustic family cottage
and attractive children is one of many images of this type -- Currier and
Ives, for example, published more than 350 hand-colored lithographs of farm
and village scenes. One of the print firm's biggest sellers was Home
to Thanksgiving (1867) based on a painting by George Henry Durrie (1820-1863).
It depicts an affluent young man (he is dressed in the clothes of urban
prosperity) returning to celebrate the holiday with his parents, who greet
him on the porch of their picturesque, snow-covered farm-house.[19] On another level, the popularity of such
imagery may also be attributed to the search for tangible ideals in a nation
that needed to heal itself after the divisive horrors of the Civil War.
When Thompson painted a companion to The Old Oaken Bucket, the now
lost Home Sweet Home (1869), John Howard Payne's inspirational poem
to which Thompson's picture paid homage was regarded as a patriotic hymn,
"one that binds not only individuals and families, but States and nations
together."[20]

Farm activities in the nineteenth century generally involved
entire families, and artists often represented them in harvest scenes such
as haying, apple gathering, and cider-making, though strenuous labor was
rarely shown. In Eastman Johnson's Corn Husking (cat. no. 22), the
farmer in the center of the painting is a heroic figure pursuing his tasks
in the time-honored traditional way; an old man at the left shows his granddaughter
how to braid corn. The obvious parallel between the cycle of life and the
productivity of the land is underscored by the courting couple at the right
who gaze fondly at one another. Another annual harvest ritual is depicted
by Tompkins Harrison Matteson in Sugaring Off (cat. no. 19), an amusing
scene of elegantly dressed city couples who, with some children, have visited
a maple sugar camp in the countryside.

While most images of rural family life in America are nostalgic
renderings of an idyllic past, Breaking Home Ties (fig. 8) by Thomas
Hovenden, painted in 1890, offers a more objective view. The economic realities
of life on small family farms by the end of the nineteenth century meant
that many young people had to seek their fortune in the burgeoning cities
and factory towns. The painting shows a mother bidding a reluctant and probably
final farewell to her city-bound son. The sadness of the occasion is underlined
by the gloomy expressions on the faces of the other figures in the bare
kitchen interior, and the dark, mournful colors. Breaking Home Ties found
enormous popular appeal because the sentiments it expressed tugged at the
very heartstrings of the Victorian family code. Reproductions of the painting
were sold well into the twentieth century.[21] When it was shown at the National Academy of Design's annual New
York exhibition in 1891 it was praised as "the most important figure
piece in the exhibition ... a masterly canvas,[22] and the artist achieved international recognition with its success
at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Interestingly, although
Hovenden's painting comments on a contemporary American social problem,
it may well have served as a metaphor for his own youthful experiences when,
as a young man, he left the family farm in County Cork, Ireland, to seek
his own fortune in America.

Courtship and Marriage

Courting couples in the nineteenth century were subjected
to all kinds of rules, and the fine line between proper and improper behavior
often caused conflict between what was expected of them and what they truly
felt. In Catharine Beecher's book, Truth Stranger than Fiction (1859),
honor in matters of love is revealed as a double standard that affected
expectations for both sexes:

By the construction of nature, by the ordinance of Providence,
by the training of the family and school, by the influence of society, and
by the whole current of poetry and literature, woman is educated to feel
that a happy marriage is the summit of all earthly felicity, and yet by
a fantasy of custom, it has become one of the most disgraceful of all acts
for a woman to acknowledge that she is seeking to attain that felicity.
On the contrary, she is trained to all sorts of concealments and subterfuges,
to make it appear as if it was a matter to which she is perfectly indifferent,
and such is the influence of custom and high cultivation, that the more
delicate, refined, and self-respecting a woman becomes, the more acute is
the suffering inflicted, by any imputation of her delicacy in this respect."[23]

While Beecher's courting code is paralyzingly genteel,
contemporary letters and diaries suggest that despite the "rules,"
courting couples in America actually enjoyed far greater freedom than was
formerly supposed."[24] Unlike
their English counterparts, the American courting couple's social activity
was usually unchaperoned, the exception being the urban elite who, possibly
in emulation of the more rigid class system that prevailed on the other
side of the Atlantic, adopted this practice in the late nineteenth century.

Mutual affection rather than income was the usual foundation
for marriage, though parental approval could be problematic if a son's or
daughter's choice of a future mate did not measure up. However in Now
or Never (fig. 9) painted in 1849 by Tompkins Harrison Matteson, the
woman being courted seems reluctant to marry at all. While her anxious suitor
hovers by her side, an open window, a traditional metaphor for freedom,
seems to be the object of her attentions. The young woman's parents in the
background anxiously await the news, for her decision to marry will mean
one less pair of hands to ease the domestic burden in their own household.
In another painting focusing on choice, Francis William Edmond's The
City and the Country Beaux (1840, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute)
offers a wry comment on the suitability of a mate for a young farm girl
who must decide between the crude country bumpkin seated at her left, and
the slickly-mannered city suitor on her right. In one of a series of amusing
pictures of late nineteenth-century courting procedures by George Hand Wright,
the apprehensive suitor depicted in An Unpropitious Moment (cat.
no. 31) realizes that he has chosen the wrong time to ask for a daughter's
hand: father is laid up with a bandaged foot.

By the 1880s, greater opportunities for middle class women
to participate in athletics meant that courting couples could be alone together
hiking, bicycling, playing tennis or croquet, and so on. Indoors, music
making was a popular pursuit for couples seeking time alone: in John George
Brown's The Music Lesson (fig, 10) painted in 1870, a genteel couple
surreptitiously flirt while they attempt to master the intricacies of the
flute.

While the narrative component of wedding scenes offered
unlimited opportunities for artists, Douglas Volk's After the Reception
(cat, no. 32), painted in 1887, is more concerned with mood than anecdote.
Here the pensive expression of the weary bride might also symbolize the
uncertainty and mixed feelings that often accompany that ultimate "plunge"
into marriage. Although most women in Victorian America expected to marry,
if only because opportunities for satisfying work outside the home were
severely limited, obedience to the strictures of ideal wifely behavior,
which emphasized piety, submissiveness, and self-sacrifice, often exacted
a toll.

"Baby is King": Woman's Mission

Motherhood acquired mythic dimensions in the child-centered
family of nineteenth-century America as it became synonymous with the guardianship
of morality, religious education, and cultural advancement. Exalted as woman's
destiny, it was a favorite subject in home magazines, popular poems, songs
and books, as well as in the visual arts. An excerpt from a moralizing text
by Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine, written in 1869, illustrates
the near-Biblical esteem in which mothers were held:

The family state then, is the aptest earthly illustration
of the heavenly kingdom, and in it woman is its chief minister. Her great
mission is self-denial, in training its members to self-sacrificing labors
for the ignorant and weak: if not her own children, then the neglected children
of her Father in Heaven... All the pleasures of this life end here; but
those who train immortal minds are to reap the fruit of their labor through
eternal ages.[25]

In Colonial America, child-rearing manuals directed nearly
all their advice to father, the principal authority in matters pertaining
to his children's care. However, by the 1830s, such literature was almost
exclusively aimed at mothers, notwithstanding the occasional comment on
fathers too frequently absent from home and preoccupied in the workplace
of the new industrial society.[26]
Raising children had become a more demanding occupation as new attitudes
toward the child evolved. No longer regarded as small adults as in colonial
times, children were now recognized as innocent and vulnerable beings who
required gentle rearing over a long period of time. In a society becoming
more urban and materialistic, busy working fathers had little time for the
day to day concerns of their children's upbringing.

The ideal mother dominated her own sphere, the household,
with seemingly endless reserves for coping with large numbers of children
and the hazards of childbirth, and devoted little time to her own needs.
Yet the following lament written in 1851 typically reveals the disillusionment
that oppressed those unable to live up to the fervently advocated standards
of the day:

The only wonder is that the mother does not sink within
the circle of everlasting drudgery, which deprives her of the privilege
of relaxation for a day, and the time which she would gladly devote to the
maternal education of her children. She is occupied, from morning till night,
in one unending round of duties and cares -- mistress, mother, and maid
of all work. Her mind, though craving knowledge, can not seek it; for she
is generally too much fatigued by the exertions of the day to seek it after
the noisy little group are out of the way Husband comes in now, and reads
from some book or newspaper. He wonders why she is so little interested,
and, maybe, very gently, hints at her deficiencies in this respect. Yes,
amid all these cares and this drudgery, he would have her satisfied and
happy. [27]

The tension between what was counted on and what actually
existed was a contributing factor to the so-called crisis in the family
that occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century as women became more
restless within their traditional roles.[28]

Such problematic concerns are not evident in the many paintings
of the period which depict mothers with their children. Primarily scenes
of middle-class family life, they celebrate maternal love as timelessly
serene and sweetly affectionate. By the end of the century, portrayals of
motherhood by artists like Mary Cassatt, Gari Melchers, and George deForest
Brush can also be viewed as constituents in the international celebration
of female nurture and fecundity that was described, in widely differing
styles, by painters such as Paula Moderson-Becker, Giovanni Seganti, and
Leon Frederic.[29]

In Lilly Martin Spencer's Mother and Child (cat.
no. 35), painted in 1858, mother, probably a self-portrait of the artist,[30] plays peek-a-boo with her baby son as
she attempts to dress him. A nursery game is also in progress in Seymour
Joseph Guy's "See-Saw Margery Daio" (cat. no. 39) of 1884:
mother swings baby on her lap after his bath. The daringly tilted pictorial
space gives the illusion of baby's forward motion, inviting the viewer's
participation in the fun. On a more serious plane, the profound intimacy
of a mother with a suckling infant at her breast suggests a secular madonna
in paintings by Enoch Wood Perry and Eastman Johnson (cat. nos. 37, 40).

Mothers were constantly bombarded with advice about healthful
activities and the proper diet for their children. In addition, dress reformers
like Abba Gould Woolson scolded mothers for dressing children "by the
dictates of the latest fashion plate," and oppressing their little
girls in tight corsets.[31] The
clothing worn by the children in Alfred Thompson Bricher's In My Neighbor's
Garden (cat. no. 43), while typically stylish dress for the decade of
the 1880s, shows how such fashionable attire restricted a child's activities.
The little boy, dressed in lace-collared suit with knickers and high-buttoned
boots, sits listlessly in a wagon, while his sister, surely weighed down
by the heavy sash around her waist, quietly admires the flowers. Despite
the paddles and pails strewn about, their outfits certainly seem inappropriate
for play in the garden of a seaside cottage.

Mothers were also warned against the temptation to beautify
their children artificially: "They pay dearly for the glory of appearing
in ringlets during the day, if they are made to pass their nights lying
upon a mass of hard, rough bobs," was the advice of one contemporary
child-rearing guide.[32]Beauty
and Barbarism (fig. 11), painted by Lilly Martin Spencer around 1890,
is a provocative response to such advice: the bleak expression on the face
of the little girl whose hair is being crimped into an elaborate style by
her mother speaks volumes against the status-conscious aspirations that
parents sometimes forced upon their children.

In upper-class households, some of the responsibility of
child-rearing could be delegated to servants. In William Henry Lippincott's
Infantry in Arms (cat. no. 46), painted in 1887, a nursemaid brings
the youngest member of the family to say good morning to his mother at the
breakfast table. However, mother is an invisible presence in Edwin Blashfield's
Waterloo: Total Defeat (cat. no. 45) of 1882. It shows instead a
butler and a maid banishing a little boy to the nursery as they clear his
toy soldiers from the tea table they will set for his parents. An intruder
in an adult world, the child must retreat to the isolation of his own quarters.

"And voices soft and sweet": The World of
the Child

Social historians have observed that the nineteenth century,
compared to previous centuries, was the "century of the child."[33] Yet, while we tend to think that the
child-oriented middle-class families of Victorian America raised large numbers
of children, in fact the birthrate declined steadily throughout the nineteenth
century. By 1910 the average number of children raised in white, middle-class
households was between three and four. On the other hand, in immigrant families,
the tendency was toward much larger families.[34]

Some have suggested that the nineteenth century's exaltation
of childhood was helped by declining infant mortality, said to have occurred
from the early 1800s. It followed that parents had a greater chance of seeing
their children survive into adulthood, and thus the affection and emotional
attachment they might formerly have withheld was now worthwhile. However,
statistics show that with increased urbanization, and the overcrowding and
pollution that came with it, there was little appreciable change in infant
mortality.[35]

The American concept of childhood changed as echoes of
the European Enlightenment's confidence in human reasoning and personal
growth were heard on these shores. Jean Jacques Rousseau's writings on the
special nature of childhood were well known here, and by 1820 prevailing
Christian beliefs in the inherent depravity of children were challenged
by such influential American theologians as William Ellery Channing and
Lyman Beecher.[36] An excerpt
from the New England Primer, a Calvinist text used in elementary
schools from about 1680, gives some sense of the burden borne by children
for whom salvation began with birth:

...I was brought to know

the danger I was in

By Nature and by Practice too,

A wretched slave to sin.[37]

In colonial portraits, children were portrayed as miniature
adults, their often grim expressions suggesting the serious commitments
of their Puritan heritage. As childhood came to be seen as distinct and
separate from adulthood, images of children often emphasized innocence and
detachment. In paintings such as Children at their Morning Devotions
(cat. no. 49) painted by Thomas Sully in 1845, and Lilly Martin Spencer's
Will You Have Some Fruit? (cat. no. 53) of 1871, the children are
pictured as pious and gentle beings whose vulnerability distinctly sets
them apart from the worldly, competitive concerns of society at large.

The identification of children with small animals was another
popular motif that underscored the concept of a child's innocence and immaturity.
In George Cochran Lambdin's Small Pets (cat. no. 52) of 1860, a young
girl cradles two kittens in her lap, while in William McCloskey's Feeding
Dolly (cat. no. 55), painted in 1890, a toy dog mayor may not be the
recipient of the food in a child's pretend game. With little girls, the
range of their experience in childhood was usually a reflection of what
was expected of them as adults. Whether depicted with their dolls in a simulated
nursery environment (cat. no. 56), sewing (cat. no. 69), or completing a
household chore, images of female children most often conformed to the ideal
mold of angelic sweetness and passivity.

On the other hand, the portrayal of male children as badly-behaved,
even cruel, was not uncommon. Perhaps an unconscious mirror of the aggressiveness
thought to be necessary for success in the masculine world of commerce,
the "naughty boy" genre has no female parallel in nineteenth-century
American painting. In two examples, Tompkins Harrison Matteson's Caught
in the Act (cat. no. 57) of 1860 shows a young boy being scolded for
breaking a pitcher, while Karl Witkowski's Stealing Apples (cat.
no. 59), painted in 1890, portrays three boys gleefully escaping through
an orchard fence, their arms filled with edible booty.

In reality, however, the behavior of American children
of both sexes was often commented upon by foreign visitors who, though admiring
of the school system here, more often than not found the children themselves
"detestable." Wrote one peeved visitor in 1867, sounding a common
note repeated through the century: "Many of the children in this country
appear to be painfully precocious - small stuck-up caricatures of men and
women, with but little of the fresh ingenuousness and playfulness of childhood."[38]

To many visitors, the cause of the problem was overly indulgent
parents whose children were out of control. The story of one child, Little
Fritz, is a case in point. Phillip Burne-Jones, the English artist, was
using the American boy as a model for one of his paintings. During the sitting,
Little Fritz announced to his grandmother, "I'll kick your head!"
Asked to apologize, recounted the artist in his memoirs, the child made
"a few perfunctory and scarcely audible sounds, which were generously
construed by the family as expressions of contrition and penitence; and
Fritz started again with a clear record for a brief period. His mother had
absolutely no influence on him whatever, and she admitted as much."[39]

But what seemed particularly galling to foreigners was
that American parents were tolerant, even proud of such rebellious naughtiness.
As Richard Rapson has explained in his amusing analysis, the cause lay less
with over-indulgent parents, than with their pride in raising "sturdy
republicans," young Americans who would carry on the anti-authoritarian
ideals and democratic principles of equality which were the founding precepts
of this nation."[40] Despite
the harshness of her own childhood, Lucy Larcom, a millworker in Lowell,
Massachusetts from the age of ten, wrote of her European counterparts in
a memoir published in 1889: "We did not think those English children
had so good a time as we did; they had to be so prim and methodical. It
seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were allowed to
romp and run wild... [We had] a vague idea that this freedom of ours was
the natural inheritance of republican children only."[41]

The subject of the working child was a major theme in the
art of the period (see cat. nos. 65, 66, 90). One of the most prolific artists
in this genre was John George Brown, who made a fortune painting sentimental
images of newspaper boys and bootblacks. There were about one million children
working regularly in New York City by the 1880s;[42] thousands of them were homeless. These children without families
lived on the streets in grim circumstances recorded for posterity in the
compelling photographs of Jacob Riis. Brown, however, typically pictured
them as well-scrubbed urchins whose expressions often conveyed a sugary
innocence and optimism. The message is clear that, despite their tattered
garments and obvious poverty, they will triumph over adversity with diligence
and hard work (fig. 12). Such images, and similar ones by Seymour Joseph
Guy (cat. no. 66), are pictorial analogues to the young heroes in Ragged
Dick (1867), the Luck and Pluck Series (1869), and the Tattered
Tom Series (1871), Horatio Alger, Jr.'s popular rags-to-riches stories
of newsboys and bootblacks who, through self-reliance and perseverance,
achieved the American dream of success.

"There's no place like home": The Cult of
Domesticity

Family life has always been centered on the home. By the
early nineteenth century, the nature of work had radically changed, and
the impact of an economy based on industry meant that middle-class husbands
and fathers were increasingly preocuppied with commercial concerns and money-making.
A very different sphere of influence existed for wives and mothers. For
them, the duties of the household comprised a profession that, in the uplifting
words of the Beecher sisters, whose home manual was published in 1869, was
"as sacred and important as any ordained to man.[43] Given the status of the prevailing domestic ideology, that old
rallying cry against female dissent (still heard in some quarters) -- "a
woman's place is in the home" -- was a formidable weapon against those
who rejected their assigned role as family protector and "angel of
the house."[44]

Housekeeping was hard work and labor-saving machinery was
limited and, where available, often inefficient. Laundry chores were among
the most taxing, and this was one area where those who could afford to do
so hired the work out to a laundress. For those who had to cope at home
with this "weekly affliction," as it was termed by one contemporary
household advisor, wash day (Monday was usually set aside) often entailed
long hours and the endurance of stifling heat over open "coppers"
(gas-heated wash tubs).[45] In
Charles Courtney Curran's two "laundry" paintings, Hanging
out the Clothes (cat. no. 80) of 1886 and Breezy Day (cat. no.
79) of 1887, however, such difficulties are not a concern. The setting is
outdoors and the thrust of the artist's subject is the effect of sunlight
as it plays over the colorful dresses worn by the women and on the billowing
sheets they are laying out to dry. Similarly set in an outdoor landscape,
wash day chores are secondary in Jerome Thompson's Frontier Wash Day
(cat. no. 78), painted in 1862, where the beautiful bank of flowers
that surrounds the figures is the main subject of the picture.

The preparation of food was probably the most time-consuming
task in the nineteenth-century household. In Shake Hands? (cat. no.
73) and Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the 'Lasses (cat. no. 74), painted
in 1854 and 1856 respectively by Lilly Martin Spencer, the artist's own
kitchen provided the setting. Spencer, who had a successful career and was
also the mother of thirteen children, achieved great popularity with her
"kitchen pieces" through prints made after them. The obvious humor
of these two works, with their cheerful women and celebration of good things
to eat is tempered somewhat by the primitive cooking facilities glimpsed
in the background, and the "everything from scratch" nature of
the food preparation.

It is worth noting that the model for Shake Hands? was
the Spencer family servant.[46]
The number of servants in middle- and upper-class homes peaked around 1870,
with estimates of one servant per (approximately) seven white families.[47] Other statistics suggest that in the
Northeast between 1870 and 1910, about twenty-five percent of middle-class
households employed at least one live-in servant. After 1870 the number
of people going into domestic service declined as better-paying jobs became
available in industry.[48] In
middle-class homes employing a single domestic helper, the work was usually
divided, the servant doing the cleaning and babyminding for example, and
her mistress the baking and sewing. Even in very wealthy households, where
the number of servants was greater, an effective mistress of the house could
easily resist the temptations of idleness by supervising the help and assisting
with seasonal domestic chores such as canning and jam-making.

By the turn of the century, increasing numbers of middle-
and upper-class women were attending college; and while it was still rare
for married women to work, many were involved in philanthropy, social reform,
and suffragism through the burgeoning women's club movement. As the status
of women began to change, career opportunities for educated single women
included those in law, medicine, and college teaching. Despite the widening
sphere of female activity beyond the home, there were many artists, for
example those in the group known as "The Ten" and the Boston School
painters, who specialized at this time in portraying women as passive, lonely
dreamers in attractive domestic settings. In Girl Playing Solitaire (fig.
13), painted by the Boston artist Frank Weston Benson in 1909, the young
woman, lost in the solitude of her own thoughts, evokes a mood of quiet
melancholy and lassitude. Engaged in nothing of importance, she is the opposite
of the typically energetic Boston clubwoman described by contemporary writers.[49] In a similar vein, the women in Thomas
Hovenden's A Reverie (cat. no. 76) of 1873, George Newell Bower's
Meditation (cat. no. 81) of 1889, and William F. Chadwick's On
the Porch (cat. no. 83) of 1908 evoke the quietistic mood that sustained
the ideal domestic environment. A response in part to the more purely aesthetic
conventions of later nineteenth-century art, the prevalence of such imagery
nevertheless suggests that artists, and by extension their patrons, were
concerned with the portrayal of women that conformed to nostalgic ideals
of femininity and domesticity.

The Black Family

By the 1830s, the inclusion of black people in works of
art had became a distinctly American motif pioneered primarily by William
Sidney Mount (1807-1868). In his paintings of rural life on Long Island
he often used Blacks, frequently depicting them as musicians. Mount's family
had inherited a number of slaves (slavery was not outlawed in the state
of New York until 1827), one of whom was a gifted fiddler, and the artist
himself was familiar with the traditions of black music from an early age.[50]

Among those who depicted slave life on Southern plantations
prior to the Civil War was the German-born Christian Mayr (1805-1851). His
Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs of 1838 (North Carolina Museum
of Art) shows black couples who are dressed in the latest Victorian fashions,
dancing in a festive setting. A scene of affluence and contentment that
seems at odds with our own perception of slavery, its effect, as Patricia
Hills has observed, "must have been reassuring to the conscience of
liberal Easterners who wanted to avoid the issue of human bondage,"[51] for the painting was exhibited in 1845
at the National Academy of Design in New York.

George Fuller (1822-1884), who, like Mayr, sought portrait
commissions in the South, documented slave life on the plantations in the
1850s when he travelled several times from his home in New York to Georgia
and Alabama. His fascinating drawings, the basis for several later paintings,
are free of the stereotyping and condescension that often marred depictions
of Blacks, such as the cruel caricatures of the popular Currier and Ives
Darktown Series, issued in hundreds of prints after the Civil War
and through the rest of the century. Fuller, like most American artists
who depicted black life, was more concerned with the picturesque than with
indicting the institution of slavery through reformist imagery. Nevertheless
his sympathies are clear in a letter he wrote to his fiancee in 1857:

I saw a scene today. Negroes sold at auction together
with horses and other cattle. It was full of suggestions which I will not
pursue now. The poor children, men, women, and little ones looked sad.
What a fate is theirs! No one to raise a voice for them and God above us
all.[52]

Fuller's helpless disgust recalls the stirring description
of a New Orleans slave market in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's
Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852).The main thrust of Stowe's
novel is the tragic separation of slave family members -- wives, husbands,
and children parted from each other by their capricious owners or an auctioneer's
whim. The book's powerful anti-slavery message was made doubly effective
through its appeal to the family and domestic values of its sympathetic
white readers.

Probably the best known painting of black family life under
slavery was Eastman Johnson's Old Kentucky Home (Negro Life in the South)
(fig.14), which, after its exhibition in 1859 at the National Academy
of Design in New York, brought the artist immediate celebrity.[53] A combination of anecdote and platitude
that offended neither abolitionist nor Southerner, the painting was also
valued as a document of contemporary history. The critic Henry Tuckerman,
writing of the work in 1867, observed:

The Old Kentucky Home is
not only a masterly work of art, full of nature, truth, local significance,
and character, but it illustrates a phase in American life which the rebellion
and its consequences will either uproot or essentially modify; and therefore,
this picture is as valuable as a memorial as it is interesting as an art-study.[54]

Emancipation meant that black family members were no longer
arbitrarily separated, and indeed, immediately following the Civil War large
numbers of black men and women legalized the marriages they had made as
slaves.[55] However, economic
conditions for the freed black people improved hardly at all through the
century. The great majority still continued to work in agriculture as sharecroppers
and tenant farmers, a black peasantry that labored in poverty. In Thomas
Anschutz's The Way They Live (cat. no. 85) of 1879, the image of
a black woman hoeing in a meager cabbage patch recalls the somber mood of
deprivation and spiritual despair found in Jean-Francois Millet's (1814-1875)
paintings of French peasant life. Interestingly, Millet's paintings were
extremely popular in America after the Civil War, and critics here interpreted
them as nostalgic evocations of a rural past or, conversely, as works of
socio-political realism that could be identified with the harsh conditions
of black life.[56]

Nevertheless, the tendency for most artists who painted
black family scenes was to lard them with sentiment. The elderly couple
in Thomas Hovenden's Sunday Morning (cat. no. 89), painted in 1881,
is, despite their shabby surroundings, serenely content, while the impoverished
family feeding the visiting minister in Richard Norris Brooke's A Pastoral
Visit (cat. no. 88) of 1881, is envisioned in terms of contrived piety
and virtue. In like manner, the poverty is picturesque and the subject matter
sugary in Harry Roseland's The Family (cat. no. 92), painted in 1901.

A more objective view of black family poverty is pictured
in Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Thankful Poor (fig. 15), painted in
1894 when the artist was visiting America from his home in Paris. Tanner,
a Black who was the son of a bishop in the Negro church, studied at the
Pennsylvania Academy under Thomas Eakins from 1880 to 1882. A victim of
outrageous bigotry perpetrated by his fellow students there,[57] Tanner found freedom from the racial
intolerance of America when he was offered the chance to study in Paris
(where he permanently settled) at the Academic Julian. On a return visit
to the United States in 1893 and 1894, he began to paint Negro subjects
because, in his own words, "of a desire to represent the serious and
pathetic side of life among them; ...other things being equal, he who has
most sympathy with his subject will obtain the best results."[58] In The Thankful Poor, a boy and
his grandfather say Grace before they begin the frugal meal set before them
on the table. Stripped of excessive detail and anecdote, the physical immediacy
and spiritual intensity of the two figures in the painting project beyond
the shallow picture space to impart a profound message of material deprivation
and unwavering faith.

Epilogue

February of 1908, a group commonly known as "The Eight"
held its first exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. A widely
publicized event, it featured works by Robert Henri, John Sloan, and others
who later became known as the Ash Can School artists because of the gritty
realism and urban subject matter of their paintings. Henri and Sloan, for
example, often portrayed the daily experience of city life in the streets,
on rooftops, and in tenements, using raw colors and thick, slashing brush
strokes to convey the essence of the working class neighborhoods they chose
as their subject matter. Novels by Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser that
captured the energy and complexity of life in the rapidly expanding American
cities, were literary equivalents to these paintings.

The urban realism of this new generation of painters confronted
issues that the earlier genre artists had neglected or only covertly addressed.
The gentle narrative idylls pictured in Domestic Bliss -- cozy children's
parties in Gilded Age parlors, meditative women with time on their hands,
cheerful families working together on pristine farms, scenes of racial and
gender harmony of mythic dimensions -- which they saw as elitist or falsely
pretty, were no longer relevant to artists who now used different criteria
in selecting their subject matter. Acknowledging the social and economic
realities of life for the vast majority of the American people, they reacted
against the sentiment and genteel superficiality of an earlier time obsessed,
so it seemed, with nostalgic yearning for a lost America.

Given the even more ironical temper of our own era, we
tend to interpret the lyrical positivism of nineteenth-century American
genre paintings negatively, to deconstruct them from the modernist viewpoint
as images based on oppression, exploitation, sexism, and so on. Yet, in
light of the fulfilling lives most of the artists themselves enjoyed, the
rosy vision of life they conveyed seems only natural. A cursory glance at
their biographies (see accompanying catalog entries) reveals that even those
considered of the lowest rank today studied and travelled abroad for lengthy
periods, found a public keen to purchase their work once they returned home,
and were actively involved in the world of art as teachers, exhibitors,
and administrators. Small wonder then that the bourgeois values of their
patrons were conveyed with such moral conviction and pictorial sparkle.
Indeed, the blissful scenes of domestic harmony typically painted by these
artists may have been closer to the truth than we have allowed ourselves
to believe. The reassurance and solidity implied in their images of home
and family, many of which were widely reproduced, spoke to the wishful needs
of a larger community clinging to stability in the face of complex social
and technological change. Thus it follows that the narrative pictures of
Domestic Bliss, whether escapist fantasy or veiled truth, further
nourish our own sense of a society whose periods of transition anticipated
the complexity and restlessness of our own times.

1 Richard H. Dana, "Domestic Life." in The Evergreen: A
Monthly Magazine of New and Popular Tales and Poetry, (1840), p. 159.

2 For a discussion of family history, see Philippe Aries, Centuries
of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. by Robert Baldick
(New York, 1962); Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England
1500-1800 (New York, 1977); Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the
Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980).

3 See Peter C. Sulton, "Life and Culture in the Golden Age,"
in Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Painting (Philadelphia Museum
of Art, 1984), p. ixxv.

10 John Demos, "Images of the American Family, Then and Now,"
in Changing Images of the Family, eds., Virginia Tufte and Barbara
Meyerhoff (New Haven, Connecticut, 1979).

11 For an interesting discussion of this painting, see Nicolaus Mills,
"The Picture of Success," Yale Review, LXVI. 3, (Spring
1977), p. 349.

12 ]See for example. "The Christian Home," in Catharine Beecher
and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home: or Principles of
Domestic Science (New York, 1869), ilIus. in Kirk Jeffrey, "The
Family as Utopian Retreat from the City: The Nineteenth Century Contribution,"
Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, LV, 1, (Spring, 1972), p.
24.

13 Clifford E. Clark, Jr., "Domestic Architecture as an Index to
Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America,
1840-1870," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, VII, I (Summer,
1976), p. 53.

14 See David Park Curry, Winslow Homer: The Croquet Game (Yale
University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1984).

16 The Picture That is Turned Toward the Wall," (1891) music and
lyrics by Charles Graham. in Donald M. Scott and Bernard Wishy, eds., America's
Families: A Documentary History (New York, 1982), p. 281.

17 Lee M. Edwards, "The Life and Career of Jerome Thompson,"
The American Art Journal, XIV, 4 (Autumn 1982), pp. 20-21. Samuel
Woodworth (1784-1843) was a founder of the New York Mirror, and a
successful playwright.

48 See Green, p. 87. For a history of domestic service, see Faye E. Dudden,
Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown,
Connecticut, 1983).

49 For an excellent discussion of the late nineteenth-century Boston
School artists and their "languid lady" imagery as a "deliberate
denial of the reformist achievements of real Boston women," see Bernice
Kramer Leader, "Antifeminism in the Paintings of the Boston School,"
Arts Magazine, 56, 5 (January, 1982), pp. 112-119. Also Leader, The
Boston Lady as a Work of Art: Paintings In{ the Boston School at the Turn
of the Century, Ph. D. diss. (Columbia University, New York, 1980).

58 "Letter by Tanner in the collection of the Pennsylvania School
of the Deaf, in Parry, p. 167.

About the author

Dr. Lee M.Edwards wrote the above essay as part of her
book, Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting 1840 - 1910.
The catalogue was published to coincide with the exhibition of the same
name at The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York, May 18 through July
14, 1986. The exhibition was later shown at The Margaret Woodbury Strong
Museum, Rochester, New York, August 17 through November 30, 1986. Dr. Edwards
has since co-authored another book, Herkomer: A Victorian Artist(1999),with SirHubert Von Herkomer.

Resource Library editor's
note

The above exhibition catalogue text was reprinted in Resource
Library on July 16, 2008, with permission of the Hudson River Museum.
The permission was granted to TFAO on June 17, 2008. Dr. Edwards essay pertains
to Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting 1840 - 1910,
which was on view at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York, May 18
through July 14, 1986.

Resource Library wishes to
extend appreciation to Laura Vookles, Exhibits Curator of the Hudson River
Museum, and Stacey Wittig for their help concerning permissions for reprinting
the above texts.